Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  But what sureness and delicacy of hand he shows in the drawings of 1874–5! Morris had launched out on a new manuscript, an illuminated folio of the Aeneid, to be done on fine vellum which Fairfax Murray had to send from Rome. Only Ned, of course, could illustrate it, and although the manuscript never went further than Book VI, he completed his set of masterly drawings. No better interpretation of one side of Virgil could be imagined than these tall pale Mantuans with shadowed eyes and dignified gestures, whose deep emotion is transferred to the background. By a brilliant device they often have to bow their heads to fit themselves into the page. Rocks and water twist, unfold in curving lines upon themselves, and we feel the lacrimae rerum there. This is a device which is associated with Mantegna and which Burne-Jones used increasingly. It solved the problem of a decorative art which, without losing its formality, conveys an intense disturbance.

  Equally civilised, though less severe, is the set for the Romaunt of the Rose. The Romaunt, of which Ned did a bewildering number of versions, gave him the procession and the searching and finding themes which he liked, and the queer characters of the Rose made in his mind a number of interesting shapes and spaces. Love in the Romaunt is a somewhat alarming natura naturans, embroidered with plants and animals, but of this Burne-Jones kept only his crown, or hat, of living birds, and created an elegant yet still magical figure. The 1874–6 set was turned into working tapestry drawings by Morris for Rounton Grange, the home of the Yorkshire ironmaster, Lowthian Bell; his wife Florence had grown up in France and was later one of the closest confidantes of Henry James.

  The cultured Bells had come to the firm and ordered the ‘right’ decorations, but by this time Whistler had already exhibited his Nocturnes against light grey walls and in his Chelsea house each room was painted a single plain colour with contrasting woodwork. The firm, in fact, was already challenged by a question: why not leave everything plain? Or in Henry James’s terms: why not beautify by omission? – which history was to answer, for many years, in Whistler’s favour. On this subject Morris was beginning to show a fierce dichotomy and even Burne-Jones was divided. Morris was yearning increasingly, even while the firm was in the middle of these large commissions, for whitewashed rooms and ‘little communities among green fields … [with] few wants, almost no furniture for instance’. He told Lowthian Bell, who was understandably surprised, that he was tired of ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’. Ned began to talk, even less probably, of a little town with only one street where everyone knew each other and which ended in cornfields at one end and woods at the other.

  He was reconciled to living in London, however, in June 1874 when Christie’s announced the Barker sale, the pictures being on view at 103 Piccadilly for several weeks by ticket of admission. Alexander Barker, the son of a West End bootmaker, had educated himself entirely and had collected Italian pictures because he liked them. Ned accompanied Frederick Burton, who had now taken over as Director of the National Gallery, to the viewing, and at the sale the gallery acquired its first Signorelli, along with the Botticelli Mars and Venus (for £1,050) and the Piero Nativity (for £2,415) – the ‘colour chord’ picture in which colour and music come as close as they well can do. It was partly because of these acquisitions that Burne-Jones never felt it absolutely necessary to make the journey to Italy again.

  Nevertheless the ‘despair’ which he had described to Watts earlier in the year – ‘I walk about like an exposed impostor’24 – became denser during the early summer. In this familiar cycle of depression he suffered from pain which Dr Marshall told him was rheumatism, and that recurrent fear of the hard-working Victorian artist, weakening eye-sight. By this time du Maurier had to work with one eye only, Burton had given up small-scale work entirely and Rossetti, in strong spectacles, was in dread of blindness. Ned’s right eye had given trouble since 1871. He had to avoid strain, and while he was resting it his family taught him to play draughts, a game which he called an accurate representation of the miseries of life.

  George Eliot, applied to once again for wise words, wrote to Georgie that she should think less about how to enjoy life (Georgie was not quite thirty) and more of helping the wounded on life’s battlefield, and making gladness for those ‘who are being born without their asking’. By ‘the wounded’ she presumably meant Ned. ‘But the journey to Naworth is a hopeful thing,’ she added. This was a visit which Morris and Ned had been induced to make together – so much was always expected from change and fresh air.

  Naworth Castle was the Cumberland home of George and Rosalind Howard – George still gently humorous, hating business, wanting only to paint in congenial society, while Rosalind, a devotee of all reforming causes, took all things more and more seriously. The management of the estate was almost entirely in her hands. She was intolerant of human weakness, and must have been surprised to receive a letter from Georgie warning her that Ned had ‘bad dreams and painful waking thoughts’ and asking her to ‘put him in a room not too far from his fellow creatures’.25 At the castle a family party was expected, but Morris and Ned arrived before this, Morris with a small carpet bag and in an explosive mood (for which he apologised later) on the subject of ugliness and poverty in industrial society; Ned still feeling ill. They had brought their familiar blue linen shirts, but only the minimum of formal clothes were necessary at Naworth, where Rosalind appeared in Pre-Raphaelite robes known as ‘bath gowns’ and George in low collar, red tie and beret (he was said once to have escorted the Prince of Wales wearing clothes from the poor box).

  It had been arranged that since they were, after all, venturing north of Hampstead they should go over to Hayton, near Carlisle, to see Canon Dixon, that good friend from Birmingham and Oxford days. Dixon was still writing poetry, still labouring in a small country parish, which cared for none of these things, on a history of the Church of England. In the event he was invited over to Naworth. This was at the suggestion of Burne-Jones, who wanted to avoid the ‘horrible’ Mrs Dixon, whom he ungallantly compared to a bun with currants stuck in for eyes.26 From the ‘abode of splendour’, as he called it to Crom Price, Dixon wrote that he found Ned ‘in poor health, I grieve to find, and a little quieter in manner, otherwise unaltered’. Morris he also thought was ‘gentle’, though Rosalind Howard felt that he lacked humanity, and was probably harder still on Ned, since she firmly believed that ‘morbid and melancholy people … ought to be all cheerful and joyous; did not believe that higher natures were unusually sad, and held that if very sensitive it was good for them to be blunted’.

  Morris and Ned fled back to London when a member of family visitors arrived, including Blanche, Lady Airlie, Rosalind’s yet more imposing sister. At The Grange, everyone was waiting to welcome Ned, although Margaret was ‘deeply asleep’ on the sofa. The amount of unfinished work in the studio made him feel giddy, although there were photographs of Botticelli and the Sistine Chapel from Fairfax Murray. Meanwhile Phil, after a summer with the Morris children in Belgium, had to be packed and got ready for Marlborough, where he would try whether it was really good for sensitive natures to be blunted. Both parents suffered over the parting. Georgie ‘gave way’ altogether, and Ned was obliged, for the first time, to buy a tall hat to take the tearful twelve-year-old down to the school. He gave Phil – who would probably have preferred Jack Harkaway – a copy of Sintram, and sent him a series of wistful affectionate letters which, though they were treasured by Phil, did not really touch the case. ‘I am afraid of seeming silly before everyone or I would run down to look at you,’ he wrote. ‘Soon you will be reconciled to the change and even glad of it perhaps.’ It is no surprise to find that when George Eliot, who did ‘run down’, called at the school a few weeks later Phil was already in the infirmary.

  In October Morris announced, unexpectedly but quite understandably, that he wanted to reorganise the firm. He had carried it through to success almost single-handed; now he was determined to consolidate it under his own direction, with Wardle as manager. He therefor
e called on the original partners to retire. Burne-Jones and Webb, who with Morris produced most of the designs, raised no objections, nor did Charlie Faulkner, and Rossetti was prepared to come to an arrangement. Ned’s letters to him are clear and sensible, pointing out not only the distress of a public dispute between old friends but the business aspect of the thing. As matters stood they were all liable if the firm failed, and there was still a chance that it might; there was everything to gain from an arrangement, and ‘why should all the lawyers we happen to know have it instead?’27 The difficulty was Madox Brown, whose suspicions of Morris and particularly of Burne-Jones had turned into a deep-seated feeling of injury. Ned ‘dissuaded’ Morris from sending a pointed letter to Brown and begged Rossetti to intervene. But William Michael had been married that year to Brown’s daughter Lucy, and Rossetti felt obliged to stand by his in-laws; besides which Brown, distracted by the mortal illness of his son Nolly, was almost beyond reason. He insisted, for example, that large sums had been voted to Webb behind his back, whereas the minutes showed that he had proposed them himself.28 Solicitors were called in and the negotiations dragged on until the spring of 1875, when the firm emerged, much impoverished, as Morris & Co., and Brown, to Burne-Jones’s regret, never spoke to him again. Ned now became the only figure designer for the firm’s window glass, and in 1874, for the first time, he earned more than £1,000 in one year from the firm, although this had left him less time to paint. ‘At present I am over-pupilled, for I can scarcely find work for Rooke at times,’ he wrote in December to Fairfax Murray.29

  Morris was able to face the world squarely at the beginning of 1875; as he says in The Half of Life Gone, even if love has died there are ‘deeds to do, and toil to meet them soon’. Rossetti had left Kelmscott the previous summer, after another serious breakdown; Mary Zambaco remained in Paris. In 1868–70 Morris, who put a very high value on personal freedom, had faced the fact that his wife and Rossetti might want to find happiness together, but the moment had passed. Janey was back in his care (together with her sister, who bored him dreadfully) and he continued to look after her as long as he could work and breathe. But he seems almost to have reached the stage, described much later by Bernard Shaw, of ‘a complete fatalist in his attitude towards all human beings where sex was concerned’. For Burne-Jones at forty, the case was very different. In February 1875 he sent Frances Graham, to the envy of her friends, a Valentine of Love with a crown of birds – his favourite design from the Romaunt, but in this case dragging a young girl through the meshes of love. He worked this year on the Orpheus and Eurydice drawings, taking Frances for the model of Eurydice and his own face for the resigned and wistful Pluto. He drew her in profile, and this was to remain his favourite view of her.

  Frances, however, like the briar rose, wounded only to heal; she believed that Ned ought to meet more people, instead of leaving or becoming silent as soon as strangers arrived. She began by introducing to him a girl who became a lifelong friend, the only girl to whom he opened his heart who was not pretty, not imaginative, but loyal, sensible, solid, and very good for him – Mary Gladstone. The sixth of Gladstone’s children, she had been brought up in the huge brilliant rough-and-tumble of Gladstones, Lytteltons and Glynnes at Hawarden, where there were enough people in the family to sing the Messiah straight through, and where everyone was sympathetic, but no one listened to what anyone else was saying. At nearly twenty-eight she was only just beginning to feel that she was not a nonentity – not, in the peculiar language used by the Glynnes, a ‘phantod’, or complete idiot. Whereas she could have only one opinion on politics, she was beginning to make her own judgements on music and painting. Her first visit to The Grange was in 1874, when she saw ‘Pygmalion, Creation, Dream of Good Women, Pan and Psyche, a girl in yellow picking flowers, such find colouring, golden yellow and dark olive green,’ this last being a commission from Aglaia Coronio. ‘… can’t make out whether he isn’t over self-conscious,’ was her frankly puzzled comment on Burne-Jones, for at Hawarden shyness was hardly allowed. Mary went on to see Watts, Leighton, and Alma Tadema, a reminder that it was the mid-seventies, art was becoming fashionable, and it was the regular thing to visit the more respectable studios on Sundays. Burne-Jones was only doubtfully beginning to ‘receive’, and was often out when viewers called. But on 17 February 1875, Mary wrote in her diary that she had met him at dinner at the Grahams ‘and much liked it. We talked hard, and he told me lots of things worth remembering. Called Browning’s outside “mossy” and said the works of a man were his real self … says he has no creative power after noon.’ Mary agreed about Browning, who now drank port all through dinner and sat in such disagreeable proximity, puffing and spitting in one’s face, that it was impossible to believe that he had written Abt Vogler.

  No one can read Mary’s diaries, edited by her friend Lucy Masterman or her unpublished letters, without feeling how valuable would be her stout support. In spite of a summer outing to Oxford with Morris, when Faulkner and Ned played the old practical jokes by pretending they had forgotten the picnic, 1875 was a year of distress. In March Georgie had to go north to her mother’s deathbed; in May Rose La Touche died, with terrible effect on Ruskin’s overwrought brain. Rossetti had returned to Chelsea, but he had not been to The Grange for four years and as the Memorials put it, he ‘had gradually ceased to ask what Edward was doing, or to show him anything of his own’. Swinburne was a faithful caller at The Grange but frequently a confused one; perhaps only Georgie could sort out the problem of one of his letters, written on ‘Thursday night as ever is, or would only it’s Friday morning’ asking how, since he has left his key ‘in the pocket of his over-waistcoat’, he will manage ‘if it snows tomorrow’.

  The Howards were as anxious as Frances Graham to take Burne-Jones out of the disasters of his own circle and restore him to what seemed to them a normal life in society. Faced by so much kindly energy, he tried to retreat into the fastnesses of the studio, or represent himself as a passive object. This proved no defence. He could not resist their introduction to the delightful Norman Grosvenor, son of Baron Ebury, a mild but earnest radical reformer and the best of talkers and listeners. Then, in the spring of 1875, the Countess of Airlie arrived at The Grange with a young friend whom she had swept off imperiously with her. Arthur Balfour, who was introduced to Burne-Jones and, in his own words ‘instantly became a victim of his mind and art’. This was what de Morgan would have called the rummest go of all. Balfour at twenty-seven was already the brilliant and apparently serene dismissive, with a reputation of alarming politeness, who would join the Fourth Party, so he said, simply in order to have room to stretch his legs on the front benches. He cared nothing about art, and was thought not to care much about human beings. ‘What a gulf between him and most men!’ was Lady Battersea’s description. Ned’s friends were all liberal reformers, Balfour was an icy high Tory. But in the spring of 1875 there was a particular reason for the visit. Balfour had been in love, as deeply as his nature permitted, with May Littelton, Mary Gladstone’s cousin, a big, warm, responsive girl to whom he had actually ‘spoken’ in the New Year; then, on 21 February, May Lyttelton died. Balfour had his mother’s emerald ring placed in her coffin, and at the funeral broke down completely. Blanche Airlie had brought him to The Grange to see something quite new – a painter painting – but what attracted him to Burne-Jones was a quality of mind, and there is no better proof than this of Ned’s intelligence. It was out of respect for this mind that Balfour ordered a set of pictures for his music room at 4 Carlton Gardens.

  Burne-Jones suggested the Perseus story, based on designs from the Earthly Paradise, a subject which introduced, once again, his favourite themes – seeking and finding, rescue, waiting, reflections. These last appear very early in his work – for example, in a study for The Lament (1866) where the model’s feet are reflected in the marble floor; in marble, metal or water they had become an obsession with him. The studio was full of beautiful studies of the images of girls in wat
er for the Mirror of Venus, and he now had to tackle the reflection in the well of Medusa. He looked at the sketches of the Etruscan Gorgon in his notebook, and haunted the print room of the British Museum.

  On 27 March Burne-Jones called at Carlton Gardens to make a survey of the job, and his report, which Balfour kept in his letter-book,30 shows the amazing confidence, even in the depths of depression, which ten years for working for the firm had given him. The light in the music-room, he tells Balfour, is much too harsh. All the windows must be reglazed and the walls repanelled in light oak. The pictures will hang in a band ‘resembling the procession by Mantegna at Hampton Court’. What is more, an oak ceiling must be put in and preferably the room must be lit with candles. One might object that this arrangement would make the pictures invisible both by night and by day, and Ned foresees the incongruity – the room will not ‘go’ with the rest of the well-appointed house; but ‘what can one do in these days but clear a little space as a sort of testimony that we don’t like it although we have to bear it?’ In a subsequent letter he gives an estimate of £4,000 for the paintings alone – not frescoes, for he never tried painting direct on to the plaster, except in his own home, after the experiments at the Red House – but six canvases: